{"id":1345719,"url":"https://alion.io/job/rfcuny-postdoc-researcher","title":"PostDoc Researcher","company":{"id":1774193,"name":"Research Foundation of CUNY","domain":"rfcuny.org","url":"https://alion.io/company/rfcuny","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":74,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":37,"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":55000,"max":65000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":65000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Gmail","optional":false},{"name":"Imitation Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-04T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-04","last_verified_at":"2026-10-12T02:53:37Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":38,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":38},"description":"Thank you for considering a career with the Research Foundation of The City University of New York (RFCUNY).\nThe team at RFCUNY is made up of dedicated, talented professionals committed to providing the services that allow CUNY researchers, faculty, and staff to focus on their intellectual curiosity and scientific discoveries.\nWe are pleased that you are interested in exploring opportunities to join RFCUNY.\nPrimary Location:\nThe CITY COLLEGE of NEW YORKBargaining Unit:\nNo\nThe AI-Enabled Bio-Inspired Materials discovery Ecosystem (AI-BIOME) at the CUNY City College of New York (CCNY) invites applications for Postdoctoral Researchers. Funded by the NSF grant award, AI-BIOME is a new, public-private Programmable Cloud Laboratory (PCL) Node dedicated to bio-derived, supramolecular, and bioinspired materials design, discovery, and characterization.\nWe are seeking exceptional, highly motivated early-career scientists to join our team at the frontier of artificial intelligence, robotics, and soft-matter physics. You will work directly with\n- Lead PI/Science Lead Ronald Koder\n- Co-PI/AI Lead Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay\n- Co-PI/Data Lead Raymond Tu\nto build a scalable, reproducible synthesis-and-characterization pipeline.\nPosition at a Glance\nRole: PostDoctoral Researchers\n\nLocation: CCNY\n\nThe Role\nThis position offers a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of AI agent-enabled reasoning and hands-on autonomous experimentation. Biological and bio-inspired materials offer a massive, programmable design space perfectly suited for algorithmic generalization and optimization. You will help pioneer closed-loop discovery, where multiple AI agents generate hypotheses, propose designs, autonomously plan and execute multi-step trustworthy experiments with robots, and refine themselves in real time through scientific exploration.\nAs Postdoctoral Researchers, your key responsibilities will include:\nResearch Integration:Conduct research integrating AI-driven experimental design with automated materials synthesis and characterization, emphasizing trustworthiness, reliability, robustness, and transparency in AI decisions that guide embedded experimental workflows.\n\nAlgorithms, Theory and System-Level Research to Control AI Agents: Build robust and efficient algorithms to control AI Agents that can learn generalizable plans to design and synthesize bio-inspired materials, adapt to mistakes in the plans autonomously, steer navigation and accelerate discovery and exploration at a distributed scale. This includes developing planning, reasoning, navigation and exploration algorithms (e.g., efficient RL, imitation learning approaches like behavioral cloning, game theoretic equilibriums, hierarchical controllers, causal and probabilistic reasoning modules) that ensure trustworthy behavior of agents in autonomous laboratory environments and enable long-horizon, multi-step high-throughput experimental campaigns.\n\nAutonomous Workflow Development:Develop new workflows within the robotic platforms, focusing on training new capabilities to the robots. You will help design and validate autonomous laboratory protocols in which embedded AI agents coordinate liquid-handling robots, robotic carts, analytical instruments, and cloud infrastructure in a closed loop high-throughput experimentation environment.\n\nScientific Publication and Communication:Disseminate scientific results to the broader community by publishing impactful research papers in reputed conferences and journals. Collaborate with PCL nodes jointly under the PCL research network.\n\nMentorship:Supervise graduate research assistants, undergraduates and the workforce originating from the AI-BIOME PCL.\n\nCollaboration:Work alongside our expansive network of partners, including researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Mozilla AI and other collaborators in major National Labs and companies.\n\nOther duties as assigned.\n\nQualifications\nPh.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computational Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, Computational Physics, Bioengineering, Computational Chemistry, or a related discipline.\n\nExperience or strong interest in developing AI/ML algorithms and methods for Single-Agent and Multi-Agent Autonomous Decision Making (such as reinforcement learning, imitation learning, game theory, control algorithms, large multimodal models (VLMs/VLAs), or Bayesian optimization) to autonomously explore physical scientific discovery, laboratory automation, or experimental control.\n\nExperience or strong interest in hardware development, focusing on building complete hardware-software systems to accelerate discovery in material and interfacial science, including robotic platforms, embedded chemical engineering systems and automated analytical pipelines tightly integrated with AI agents and cloud-based orchestration.\n\nAbility to work independently while contributing effectively to a highly collaborative, multidisciplinary team environment. A strong commitment to responsible research practices, reproducibility, research ethics and clear communication of autonomous behavior in scientific settings is expected.\n\nWork Arrangement\nWork Arrangement: On-Site at the CCNY campus in the West Harlem Innovation Triangle, with close coordination in CUNY GC and CUNY ASRC.\nAppointment Period: One year, starting October 1, 2026\n\nAppointment Type: Full-time (Renewable based on performance / funding)\n\nOur Environment\nAI-BIOME is co-located within the CUNY City College of New York (CCNY) and CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) in New York City and is the only PCL node in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut Metropolitan Area. You will have access to unmatched computing infrastructure, high-throughput liquid-handling robotics, and automated analytical tools (including photoelectron & Raman spectroscopies, AFM, and electron microscopy). AI-BIOME’s programmable cloud laboratory environment is designed for AI agents-enabled scientific discovery in autonomous laboratories, where AI agents make autonomous decisions based on computational models with robotic execution for high-throughput experimentation in a unified platform. AI-BIOME will serve as a national training hub, providing fellows with strong intellectual and career-development support.\nHow to Apply\nReview of applications will begin immediately and continue until the positions are filled.\nApplicants should be prepared to upload a CV (including a publication list), a brief statement of research interests highlighting relevant technical expertise, and contact information for 3 references on the https://rfcuny.wd108.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/RFCUNY/details/ entry for this position. Questions can be directed to  cc’ing ,  and \nPay Range:\n$55,000 to $65,000\nRFCUNY Benefits\nRFCUNY Employee Benefits and Accruals\nEqual Employment Opportunity Statement\nThe Research Foundation of the City University of New York is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action/Americans with Disabilities Act/E-Verify Employer. It is the policy of the Research Foundation of CUNY to provide equal employment opportunities free of discrimination based on race, color, age, religion, sex, pregnancy, childbirth, national origin, disability, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, domestic violence victim status, arrest record, criminal conviction history, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7611,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Education","Higher Education","Continuing Education"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-27T16:35:41Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 42 · green card filings: 1","filings_12m":42,"filings_prev_12m":58,"green_card_filings_12m":1,"median_offered_wage_usd":77849,"route":null,"cap_exempt":true,"checked_at":"2026-10-03T21:08:04+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":29,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.389,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":36,"expected_fill_days":37,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","win:late","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":65000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/rfcuny-postdoc-researcher","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/rfcuny-postdoc-researcher.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-12T03:56:47Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":6251,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-13T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":1774193},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=1774193"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Frfcuny-postdoc-researcher"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Frfcuny-postdoc-researcher"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Frfcuny-postdoc-researcher"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/rfcuny-postdoc-researcher\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Frfcuny-postdoc-researcher"}]}